In recent years, mobile electronic devices have become hugely popular due to their portability, versatility, and ease-of-use. Although there are many different types of mobile electronic devices such as smart phones, portable music/video players, and tablet personal computers (PCs) currently available on the market, most of them share some basic components. In particular, most of these devices include a display such as a liquid crystal display (LCD) or an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display. The display can be positioned partially or fully behind a touch sensor panel to form a touch screen, which has been widely adopted as an input device in various types of mobile electronic devices.
The display of a mobile electronic device typically includes a display panel, which may be made of glass or other suitable transparent substrate. To minimize the overall weight and thickness of the device, it is desirable to make the display panel of a device as thin as possible. Nevertheless, the thinness of a display panel is limited by the minimum thickness tolerance of existing manufacturing equipment. Display panels are typically fabricated from transparent substrates, such as glass sheets. Glass sheets that are too thin and may not fit the manufacturing equipment, and/or may be too fragile to withstand the rigors of the fabrication process. Most existing manufacturing equipment can only process glass sheets (or other similar transparent substrates) with a minimum thickness of, for example, 0.5 mm. Glass sheets that are thinner than the minimum thickness may be handled by the equipment, but with limited yield and capacity. Accordingly, existing display panel fabrication processes often require a thinning step to reduce the thickness of the display panel after most of the other processing steps on the panel have been performed. However, if a defect occurs during the thinning process and the display panel becomes unusable, all the pre-thinning processing on the panel can be wasted, which can potentially increase the cost of the overall fabrication of the display panels. Therefore, it is desirable to be able to fabricate display panels directly from thin glass.